On the recordMarch 24, 1994
No, not at all. I ask you to tell the American people what percentage of my income I paid in taxes in every year where I reported my tax returns. And let me tell you what my wife and I spent the eighties doing: I was the lowest paid Governor of any State in the country. I don't complain about it. I was proud of that. I didn't do it for the money. I worked on creating jobs and improving education for the children of my State. Every year I was Governor, my wife worked in a law firm that had always done business with the State. She never took any money for any work she did for the State. And indeed, she gave up her portion of partnership income that otherwise came to the firm, and instead every year gave an enormous percentage of her time to public service work, helping children and helping education and doing a lot of other things, giving up a lot of income. Now, we did that because we wanted to. The fact that we made investments, some of which we lost money on, some of which we made money on, has nothing to do whatever with the indictment that I made about the excesses of the eighties. And we always made every effort to pay our taxes. I would remind you that we, like most middle class folks, we turned our records over to an accountant. I always told the accountant to resolve all doubts in favor of the Government. I never wanted any question raised about our taxes. When it turned out in our own investigation of this Whitewater business that one year we had inadvertently taken a tax deduction for interest payments when, in fact, it was principal payment, even though the statute of limitations had run, we went back and voluntarily paid what we owed to the Federal Government. And if it turns out we've made some mistake inadvertently, we will do that again. But I have always tried to pay my taxes. And you will see when you look at all the returns that we've always paid quite a considerable percentage of our income in taxes. Yes. White House Staff
Source
govinfo.gov
